The present invention relates to a control method for an operating machine. The present invention further relates to a system program having a machine code which can be executed by a numerical control device for an operating machine to execute such a control method, and to a numerical control device which can be programmed with such a system program, and to an operating machine.
The following discussion of related art is provided to assist the reader in understanding the advantages of the invention, and is not to be construed as an admission that this related art is prior art to this invention.
AT 401 746 B discloses a control method, a system program, an associated numerical control device and an associated operating machine, whereby a path to be left by the manipulator of a robot is divided into a multiplicity of chronologically equidistant path points. The respective robot configuration (i.e. the relevant position set point values of all the position-controlled axes) is ascertained and entered in a table for each path point or corresponding to this for each time. The position-controlled axes are activated after completion of the table, in other words only after ascertaining the robot configuration for all the path points.
Redundant robots (or similar operating machines with redundancies) are known. “Redundant” means that the machine structure has more degrees of freedom than necessary for the actual movement task. In the simplest case, in the event of such a redundancy explicit programming of all the position-controlled axes takes place when the user creates the user program so that the redundancy is practically unused. However, from AT 401 746 B for example, it is likewise already known only to program the actual control task (i.e. the path points to be approached by the end effector) and to specify additional boundary conditions which should be observed when ascertaining the position set point values. In this case, the numerical control device ascertains the position set point values of the position-controlled axes automatically on the basis of a predetermined criterion.
The approach taken by the AT 401 746 B is disadvantageous because the respective associated control signal group must always be ascertained in advance for all of the path points to be approached. In particular, this is time-consuming for long sequences of path points.
It would be desirable and advantageous to address prior art shortcomings.